The Real ROI of AI in Patent Practice

2025 was the year patent practitioners adopted AI. 2026 is the year it has to prove what that adoption is actually worth. The profession has defaulted to "time saved" as the primary measure of AI's value, but that metric is simply incomplete, and for many firms, it's becoming commercially dangerous. This white paper examines why efficiency alone is a self-limiting measure of AI's value, what separates the firms that are capturing real competitive advantage from those that aren't, and the one structural problem that has become an elephant in the room. This piece is the first thorough analysis of AI ROI written specifically for patent practitioners.